Off to an action-packed Advent

One of the things that I love about having Henry in a Catholic school is what he came home with yesterday. A giant chain of construction paper rings, a little single decade rosary, a sheet of prayers with a calendar, and some explanatory paperwork. For an Advent project, we're supposed to hang up his chain, and each night remove one of them counting down to Christmas, while saying the enclosed prayers. Each day, Hank is to color in the appropriate square on the calendar showing that we said the prayers and kept up with the Advent chain. It's very cute.

We've also put out his much beloved chocolate Advent calendar, as well as our wood one. I'm still struggling with the ill-fitting candles in our Advent wreath, mew. I'm going to head to the Catholic store with Hank tomorrow to get some replacement candles. I read a trick online about softening the wax at the bottom of the candle to fit the taper more properly into the holder securely. We'll see how that goes.

Hank is very chagrined about the fact that a very mobile Anne has taken a real shine to his Fisher Price nativity set, which he looks forward to putting out every year. There are lots of teary incidents in which Anne crab crawls over and immediately stuffs a shepherd into her mouth. Wise men go flying, lambs are everywhere, and Hank is scandalized. We don't have a lot of other location options for the nativity, so it either has to stay there or get put away. He's really good about sharing usually, but his nativity set is apparently sacred.

Well, in another Christmas tradition, I think I'm going to splurge and go to Starbucks for some sort of overpriced holiday-themed beverage. I don't usually pay $5 for what is essentially flavored coffee, but on chilly, snowy days like today, with a manuscript to read and write a review of, I think it's in order.